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THE United Nations has ordered staff in East Timor not to co-operate with Australian Federal Police investigating the massacre of 12 unarmed Timorese officers by renegade soldiers, prompting allegations of a cover-up. An email from the UN's deputy representative in Timor, Pakistani General Anis Bajwa, had been circulated to all staff, including employees evacuated to Australia, directing them not to assist AFP detectives investigating the worst atrocity since the violence of 1999. A copy of the email had been passed to Australia's Embassy in Dili, outraged diplomats and AFP sources confirmed to AAP. Earlier today the UN denied the email...

FAIRFAX, Va. -- Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, tells NewsMax that the United Nations is dead set on writing a treaty that will curb domestic ownership of guns. He also says his worst fear is that a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency would allow such a treaty to severely damage Second Amendment rights. "She has never cast a pro-gun vote in the U.S. Senate," advises LaPierre, author of "The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the U.N. Plan to Destroy the Bill of Rights." "She will probably be the most anti-firearm Second Amendment candidate to ever run...

In a recent interview, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton described the UN as hopelessly out of touch and stuck in a Twilight Zone-style "time warp" where "there are practices, attitudes and approaches that were abandoned 30 years ago in much of the rest of the world." [1] Bolton's cutting analysis perfectly captures the latest controversy to hit Turtle Bay—Secretary-General Kofi Annan's appointing German activist Achim Steiner as Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) just months after Steiner helped award Annan $500,000. [2] Steiner, whose four-year term of office will begin next month, was part...

'How corrupt is the UN?" That's the question asked by Claudia Rossett in the current issue of Commentary magazine. If any reporter on earth can offer a definitive answer, it is Rossett. A former editor at the Wall Street Journal, Rossett has led the investigation of the oil-for-food scandals -- and the broader issue of corruption at the United Nations. The UN is a large and poorly understood institution. Although it declares a formal "core" budget of only US$1.9-billion per year, the UN and the various quasi-autonomous agencies under the direct control of the Secretary-General spend between US$8- and US$9-billion...

This has been another week of infamy at the United Nations -- they have strung quite a few hundred of them together -- and while one can’t refer to a “low point” in an institution that is morally bottomless, the failure to do anything even mildly credible about the nuclear threat from Iran is at least worthy of note. Three weeks after the urgent matter of Iran’s non-compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was referred to it, the Security Council issued a non-binding presidential statement. The members could not even draft a Security Council resolution. They could not bring themselves...

Nearly three years ago, the space shuttle Columbia crashed, and Katie Couric on NBC’s Today show saluted the fallen heroes as follows: “They were an airborne United Nations—men, women, an African-American, an Indian woman, an Israeli....” By contrast, there’s a famous terror-supporting Islamist imam in Britain, Abu Hamza, who, when the shuttle crashed, claimed it was God’s punishment “because it carried Americans, an Israeli and a Hindu, a trinity of evil against Islam.” Say what you like about the old Islamofascist nutcake, but he was at least paying attention to the particulars of the situation, not just peddling, as Katie...

Serial rapists envy United Nations peacekeepers. And who could blame them? Most rapists do not get to police their own crime scenes, food to trade for sex, diplomatic immunity and indifference from the people supervising them. Sexual abuse charges against U.N. peacekeepers remain high due to the organization's "culture of dismissiveness," according to Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid al-Hussein, Jordan's U.N, ambassador. He thinks it could take three to four more years for a reform program to take hold. Potential rape victims in the world's hot spots will have to be patient. There have been allegations against 295 troops, police and...

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Saturday that the world body is hobbled "by bad management, by sex and corruption" and a lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions. John Bolton also criticized the U.N.'s budget, noting that two-thirds of members pay only 20 percent of the cost. "We find an organization that is deeply troubled by bad management, by sex and corruption and by a growing lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions that are given to them," Bolton told an audience at a Columbia Law School symposium held by the...

THE UN's Human Rights Commission is the canary in the UN coal mine. Not quite dead yet, but spluttering in its death throes, it stands as a warning of all that is wrong with the UN. And if the UN cannot revive its farcical underling, then it has no hope of fixing itself. With the UNHRC due to meet for its last meeting early next month, time is running out. To understand what went wrong with the UNHRC, you have to start with the mother body. Uniting nations under the idea of the United Nations was always a big ask....

Why the UN needs reform In 1991, the members of the United Nations threw their collective efforts behind the attempt to guarantee peace and to bring free elections to Cambodia. To one of the world's most abused, tragic nations, the UN sent its biggest, most expensive peacekeeping force in history. In about two years, some 20,000 UN troops passed through the unfortunate country, proving again the cliche about too many cooks spoiling the broth _ except that the ''broth'' was the nation of Cambodia. The peacekeeping mission turned into a travesty which failed to suppress the Khmer Rouge, tripled the...

At one level, the United Nations is merely the latest variant on the Congress of Vienna held almost two centuries ago—a venue where the great powers sit down to resolve the problems of the world to their mutual satisfaction. Unfortunately, unlike Lord Castlereagh, Prince Metternich and Talleyrand, none of whom would be asked to audition for a “We Are The World” charity fundraising single, the UN has become the repository of all the West’s sappiest illusions of one-worldism. Let me give an example. Nearly three years ago, the space shuttle Columbia crashed, and Katie Couric on NBC’s Today show saluted...

DESPITE FREQUENT DECLARATIONS OF REFORM, it seems that United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has learned nothing from the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food scandal, in which Saddam Hussein's billions corrupted the U.N.'s entire Iraq embargo bureaucracy. Earlier this month, Annan accepted from the ruler of Dubai an environmental prize of $500,000--a fat sum that represents the latest in a long series of glaring conflicts of interest. Call this one Cash-for-Kofi. snip So entwined were Annan's own U.N. colleagues in the process that selected him for this award that it's tempting to relabel the entire affair as one of the U.N.'s biggest back-scratching contests....

A top Australian diplomat says the United Nations is rotten to the core and is mishandling the threat of nuclear weapons. Australia's ambassador to the United Nations John Dauth has returned to Canberra after four-and-a-half years in the role. Mr Dauth said that while bodies such as the UN's food program and children's fund UNICEF were working, the General Assembly was not. "The General Assembly is defunct," Mr Dauth told ABC radio. "No debate there carries with it any practical action or decision or agreement or compromise. "And if the heart of the body, if the core of the apple,...

The UN, left to itself, will end up giving corruption and socialism a bad name. Joseph Klein has written Global Deception to show why. He pinpoints the UN's greatest threat in his subtitle: The UN's Stealth Assault on America's Freedom.The corruption of the UN leadership, and its heavy hitter supporters such as Canadian oil billionaire, Maurice Strong, is a litany of hypocrisy on a par with the glitterati of Hollywood. "Do as I say, not as I do." Most readers are aware of Kofi Annan, the pious critic of greedy capitalists, who plunged so deeply into the Oil for Food...

What will it take to knock the United Nations off the pedestal that it occupies in the minds of American internationalists? Certainly not passivity in the face of genocide. The loathsome record of the UN fiddling while innocents burn in Bosnia, Rwanda and now Darfur has not dimmed the affections of the world body’s faithful devotees. Nor do serial rape and institutionalised paedophilia seem to serve as disqualifiers, either. The multi-lateralist faith of the UN cheerleading squad appears to be unshaken by a sordid trail of sexual exploitation left by blue-helmeted peacekeepers from Kosovo to the Congo. In 2001, a...

At one level, the United Nations is merely the latest variant on the Congress of Vienna held almost two centuries ago—a venue where the great powers sit down to resolve the problems of the world to their mutual satisfaction. Unfortunately, unlike Lord Castlereagh, Prince Metternich and Talleyrand, none of whom would be asked to audition for a “We Are The World” charity fundraising single, the UN has become the repository of all the West’s sappiest illusions of one-worldism. Let me give an example. Nearly three years ago, the space shuttle Columbia crashed, and Katie Couric on NBC’s Today show saluted...

UNITED NATIONS — How bad is the still expanding scandal in the United Nations' multi-billion-dollar procurement division? Based on a still-secret internal investigation, the answer is: for the U.N., it is just as bad as the gigantic Oil-for-Food debacle — or maybe worse. The focus of the current scandal is U.N. peacekeeping, a function that consumes 85 percent of the U.N.'s procurement budget — a cost that could reach $2 billion in 2005. Like many of the U.N.'s financial dealings, it is shrouded in secrecy. And like the multi-billion-dollar Oil-for-Food scandal, it is wrapped in what the U.N.'s own investigators...

An internal review of United Nations peacekeeping activities has found “substantial evidence of abuse” in procurement operations, leading to “financial losses and significant inaccuracies in planning assumptions”, according to a copy of the report circulating in New York. The review, which may be published imminently, also expresses “great concern” at a failure of UN management to enforce accountability and adhere to internal control procedures. The findings are likely to deal a powerful new blow to the world body headed by Kofi Annan, its secretary-general, as it tries to recover from scandal over its mismanagement of the multi-billion-dollar oil-for-food programme in...

EIGHT UN officials have been suspended with pay as part of an investigation into the world body's procurement services following scandals in the oil-for-food program in Iraq, UN officials said this morning. The investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services is the result of a probe into contracts in the UN peacekeeping department, which is fielding some 85,000 troops, police and civilians around the world. "There is an audit being done of peacekeeping department management," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. "As a result of that audit, which also took a look at the procurement department ... we have...

NEW YORK, Dec. 23 (UPI) -- Up to about a third of the $590 million U.N. fund spent for the Indian Ocean tsunami relief may have gone to pay for overhead. The Financial Times says its two-month investigation showed the money appears to have been spent on administration, staff and related costs. The $590 million was part of the United Nation's $1.1 billion disaster flash appeal. The newspaper also found several U.N. agencies continue to refuse to disclose details of their relief expenditure in spite of earlier pledges of transparency by senior officials. The flash appeal covered the money donated...